Pretty maps in Python | Hacker News Reader

Pretty maps in Python

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301 pointstodsacerdoti21 comments

Making maps without an external service on macOS is an exercise in dependency hell.

About once a month, I have to run a script I wrote that generates a list of lat/lon values from company data to generate maps in python. I have to keep a separate machine on an old version of macOS just for this task because python3 broke everything.

ALL of the tutorials online are out of date, broken, or simply don't work. I even contacted the people at Geofabrik and offered to pay them for a solution, but they wouldn't touch the problem with a ten meter cattle prod.

I guess I'll spin up an Ubuntu VM and see if this solution works for me. But the state of mapping is abysmal. Everything is an online service or a GUI. And none of the online services can do batch processing.

Another option for you to try: I recently used https://pypi.org/project/py-staticmaps/ to generate maps in Python 3 on my Mac, and even got the Cairo option working. My script to generate maps for state and country capitals: https://github.com/pamelafox/chrome-cards/blob/master/genera...

Staticmaps is great! I've used it to generate a map of our area pointing out where the BBQ area is for guests, I've used it to generate maps of bike rides and hikes I go on, it's really fun. Definitely needs a bit of light GIS knowledge but nothing someone with decent Python skills and a free-ish weekend can't pick up.

R and Python both have state of the art mapping tools and libraries that you can either script or use interactively in a notebook to accomplish literally any conceivable task using vector or raster data, from a simple choropleth map to geographically weighted regression to analysing satellite imagery using pre-trained models. Making publication-quality maps using point data is absolutely trivial, and there are a number of high-quality learning resources available (https://geo-python.github.io/site/, https://automating-gis-processes.github.io/site/)

I started working with spatial data on the Mac platform before Python 3 had gained much traction, and I can assure you that Python 3 really didn’t break much to speak of. Every major library and tool works as well as ever, and in most cases is vastly improved.

I think we have very different definitions of trivial

In the context of Hacker News and the parent comment’s lack of interest in GUI-based tools, I’m pretty confident in my definition.

I never trust a “trivial” on HN.

Weird. I've had no issues on several recent versions of Mac. I use Brew to manage the base, add gcc, and use virtual environments. No issues whatsoever.

What's your source data? I am currently working on standalone map renderer written in Nim. My source data is are vector tiles and it works reasonably well...

I had absolutely zero trouble on Windows 10/Ubuntu 22.04 a couple weeks ago doing mapping. I downloaded the JSON location data from my Google account and this is what I ended up with: cartopy + matplotlib + shapely.

I believe the examples for cartopy mostly work out of the box.

Can't speak for Mac OS but I assume all those are conda-installable there as well.

Cool, got it working. Spews a fair number of warning to stdout though. A few dozen of:

/home/bill/.pretty/lib/python3.10/site-packages/prettymaps/fetch.py:317: ShapelyDeprecationWarning: __len__ for multi-part geometries is deprecated and will be removed in Shapely 2.0. Check the length of the `geoms` property instead to get the number of parts of a multi-part geometry. list(lines) /home/bill/.pretty/lib/python3.10/site-packages/prettymaps/fetch.py:317: ShapelyDeprecationWarning: Iteration over multi-part geometries is deprecated and will be removed in Shapely 2.0. Use the `geoms` property to access the constituent parts of a multi-part geometry. list(lines)

Funnily enough, I came across this library a few weeks ago and made a PR to set the right version of the library that throws the errors. If you incorporate this, these will likely all disappear.

Worth noting the reaction* of some NFT seller who was outed as using this library.

* https://github.com/marceloprates/prettymaps/blob/main/etc/NF...

I wanted an excuse to make my first replit so I added it here: https://replit.com/@cameron-p-m/PrettyMap

Let me know what it's like running it!

Try it out here: https://share.streamlit.io/chrieke/prettymapp/main/streamlit...

Looks like it died, guess a few too many people tried to run it at once.

I played around with this library a few months ago and it is an absolute joy to use if you like maps.

What kind of use cases? I have found mapping software in python mostly to be labor intensive and not highly functional

For me it was strictly personal use. For example, I made a series of maps for stadiums for teams in the EFL Championship to use as wallpaper when my club has away matches. I also made some for my hometown and for the universities where my kids are studying.

Link to the HN discussion mentioned in the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28300951 (982 points | 10 months ago | 74 comments)

the online site.... for address you can take lat/lon from open street map and put that instead of trying to pass it a postal address. eg 40.97315, -77.69783

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